Games review – Venetica dices with Death

Death’s daughter holidays in Venice, but beyond an Assassin’s Creed style historical setting does this action role-player have anything to recommend it?

Venetica (PC) – giant enemy crabs are so 2006

We always hoped that the success of Assassin’s Creed might lead to a more varied range of historical settings in video games. As far as most games are concerned history only began with the Second World War and yet Ubisoft’s series shows how foolish developers are in ignoring the far wider potential available. This is one of the few games to make the effort and dig deeper into the history books, although its list of other achievements is rather slim.Although this is an action role-player, German developer Deck 13 are best known for such mirth-free graphic adventures as Ankh and Jack Keane. Venetica is primarily set in 16th century Venice (with a short detour to Africa) and involves Scarlett, the daughter of Death, trying to stop her dad’s powers being used and abused by the game’s lead bad guy.The game starts out with Scarlett living a bucolic idyll with her husband Benedict. He’s promptly killed (although it’s okay, he comes back as a ghost) and Scarlett sets off upon her very own rip-roaring road to revenge. The visuals, and the game in general, are clearly pretty low budget, but there’s a decent sense of scale and the novelty of the setting is enough to overcome nerdier complaints about simplistic 3D models and textures.The problem is that the combat isn’t much more complex, although depending on which weapon you specialise in it is fairly satisfying. The giant hammer is particularly good and the other swords, scythes and spears are all visceral enough in action to make you forget you’re just mindlessly clicking the mouse button over and over again – at least for the first few hours.The only real complication to the combat comes via the combo system, which involves you loosing your next attack only when your weapon sparkles. Keep up the rhythm and the enemies will fall even more easily.The most important weapon in your armoury is the Moonblade, which is the only one capable of (re-)killing undead creatures. Scarlett is able to move into the spirit world at will you see, which is obviously necessary for dispatching more spectral enemies but also handy when dealing with large numbers of ordinary enemies.The whole spirit world angle isn’t really played up in any more interesting way though and the most inventive moments are generally reserved for the boss battles, which alone are enough to prove that Deck 13 have a much brighter future making action games than adventures.Unfortunately it’s the role-playing aspect that really lets the side down, with only a very limited set of stats to nurture. You can also learn more specialised spell that do things like leech health from enemies or allow you to block with different weapons, but it’s all still pretty basic stuff.The quests are similarly uninspired and repetitive and since it’s one of the few activities that doesn’t involve smacking enemies over the head with a blunt instrument the silly Simple Simon style lock-picking game is horribly overused.The game gets off relatively lightly in terms of voiceovers, even though the subtitles often never seem to match the spoken text. But the dialogue itself is stodgy and clearly not very well translated from the original German.Many of these problems are exactly what you’d expect from a low budget actioner from an inexperienced developer and to be fair none of them completely ruin the experience. At the same time though there’s little real reason to put up with the various faults and foibles beyond a few hours of mildly enjoyable combat and a tour of a not-entirely-convincing virtual Venice.In Short:It’s good to see Assassin’s Creed having a positive influence on game settings but this historical would-be epic has little else to recommend it.Pros:The combat is enjoyably visceral and there’s certainly a fair amount of ambition in terms of the locales and boss battles. Spirit world aspect is a neat idea.Cons:The role-playing elements are fairly basic and allow for little real character customisation. Below par graphics and scrappy dialogue and voiceovers.Score:4/10Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3Price: £29.99, cert 16Publisher: dtp entertainmentDeveloper: Deck 13 InteractiveRelease Date: 12th November 2010